Houses float away; towns swallowed by water, sand

Oct. 31, 2012

This aerial photo shows flooding caused by Superstorm Sandy on the bay side of Seaside Heights on Tuesday. / Tim Larsen/Office of the Governor

Belmar, NJ-10/30/12- Hurricane Sandy Aftermath-Bob Bielk/ Asbury Park Press Staff Photographer: Aftermath of hurricane Sandy on the Belmar, NJ beachfront. The pilings are all that is left of the boardwalk .

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Anxiety gave way to shock Tuesday as Jersey Shore residents confronted breathtaking scenes of destruction caused by Superstorm Sandy. President Barack Obama will visit the area today to inspect the damage.

Monmouth and Ocean counties are in shambles. Whole towns were swallowed by sand and water. Miles of boardwalk were ruined. Portions of Long Beach Island suffered catastrophic property damage. Aerial TV footage showed yachts protruding from flooded homes and streets choked with piles of splintered debris.

An estimated 90 percent of residents in Monmouth and Ocean counties were without power, and it will be days if not weeks before the lights come back on. Statewide outages totaled 2.7 million customers.

“The level of devastation at the Jersey Shore is unthinkable,” said Gov. Chris Christie, who toured the area by helicopter, landing in Belmar at one point.

Shortly before noon Tuesday there were at least 20 fires raging in Ocean County, reported Ocean County Administrator Carl W. Block. Most were in places where high water made it difficult, if not impossible, for firefighters to access.

Statewide, the storm killed at least six people, including an unidentified man whose body was pulled from the Hackensack River in Hackensack on Tuesday and a 61-year-old Princeton man killed Monday night by a tree that fell on him as he cleared debris from his driveway.

“It’s all gone,” Jamie Wineriter, 41, of Freemont Avenue in Seaside Heights said of her flooded first floor apartment. She was staying at a local shelter with her 15-year-old son. “Right now (about 2 p.m. Tuesday) in the area, there’s about 8 feet of water.”

Curfew imposed

Monmouth County imposed a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew. Officials in Manasquan urged residents not to use toilets because high water had compromised pumping stations.

The disaster was still unfolding late Tuesday, with rescue crews working around the clock to bring trapped residents to safety and search for people who may have stayed behind to ride out the storm. With telephone lines down, as well as estimated one-quarter of the cellular towers down in Sandy’s 10-state path, calling for help wasn’t always possible.

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“Our teams are moving as fast as they can,” Christie said.

So severe was the flooding on Ocean County’s barrier islands that Christie’s State Police helicopter had no safe place to land.

Ocean waves crashed over the mangled remains of the Casino Pier roller coaster in Seaside Heights, as if it were a child’s beach toy left behind before the high tide rolled in. Funtown Pier in Seaside Park was also destroyed.

“There has to be a billion dollars damage here,” Seaside Heights Mayor Bill Akers estimated. “I could never have imagined it.”

Property damage could top $50 billion for all the states affected by the storm, according to one estimate. In Monmouth and Ocean counties alone, there is an estimated $55 billion worth of property.

Nearly a half-million Shore area residents were in darkness at the height of the storm Monday night. Exploding transformers illuminated low-hanging storm clouds in colorful arcs of electricity throughout the night, and the drone of generators vied with the howl of hurricane-force winds that snapped or toppled trees in virtually every neighborhood.

A 70-foot-tall white oak fell down in Terence Whalen’s front yard in Brick and narrowly missed his neighbor’s house across the street. Sandy, he said, “was 10 times worse than Irene.”

With many trees and utility poles down, few traffic signals were working, which made every major intersection a white-knuckle affair for those who ventured out.

“This was more than we expected. I have a generator so I’m running electricity for like half the neighborhood, and will be for a while,” said Jay Santos of Brick, who helped rescue waterfront neighbors in a canoe Tuesday.

Asked for an update on the conditions in Belmar Tuesday afternoon, a borough police officer responded, “In one word: devastation.”

“After we survived the ’92 storm, we figured we could make it through again if we had to,” said marina owner Hans Pedersen, who shook his head as he stared at what he estimated to be millions of dollars worth of damage. “This was four times worse than ’92.”

Jane Frotton, the chairwoman of the Atlantic Highlands Harbor Commission, estimated the storm caused between $30 million and $40 million in damage to the municipal marina and other borough property, not including damages to privately owned boats.

“Every pier is gone,” Frotton said, including the fishing pier, several new floating piers and the Sea Streak commuter ferry pier.

The storm left an altered landscape up and down the Shore.

In Sea Bright, the landmark Donovan’s Reef oceanfront bar was destroyed. In Long Branch, the blades were torn off the Windmill hot dog restaurant.

In Asbury Park, the boardwalk sustained extensive damage. Two popular food stands, Mogo and the Crepe Shop, appeared to have been lifted off of the boards and dropped into the middle of nearby Ocean Avenue. Elsewhere in the city, Sunset Lake overflowed, flooding a portion of Sunset Avenue east of Main Street, and portions of Deal Lake Drive flooded after that lake breached its banks, causing severe flooding on the Allenhurst side of the lake. The iconic Stony Pony night club, though, survived unscathed.

The storm washed away the building at the end of the Ocean Grove fishing pier, caused extensive damage to the boardwalk and ripped a piece of the roof off the Great Auditorium.

A short walk from the ocean on Main Avenue in Ocean Grove, head innkeeper Heather Schulze busied herself by sweeping up the front steps of the Quaker Inn late Tuesday morning. Except for losing power, the 1860 inn sustained no major damage.

“I know it’s a bit in vain, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” she said.

The iconic hunting shack located next to the causeway leading to Long Beach Island was swept away, Harvey Cedars police reported.

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In Little Egg Harbor, Monday night’s storm surge carried off boats in winter storage at Total Marine, a marina on Great Bay Boulevard.

“I’ve got two 40-foot boats behind my house. They’re bigger than my house,” said one man in a group of dazed-looking residents returning to their houses off Boom Way.

“I just pulled it for winter storage last week,” said Milan Martinovitch, whose Joyce CM II, a 38-foot Ocean Yachts, was cast up against the back of a lagoon-front home.

“We just put it in the water in July. It’s totally redone. We worked on it for three years — new carpet, new furniture,” said his wife Joyce.

On Chesapeake Drive, Bob Cook’s 50-foot classic wooden cabin cruiser was impaled on one of the pilings of his new $15,000 bulkhead.

Bigger than 1944 storm

David A. Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist at Rutgers University, said in an email that it’s “beginning to look pretty clear that this will be N.J.’s most devastating, and certainly costliest, natural disaster ... hopefully not the most deadly.”

“I’m getting a sense of the devastation around N.J. and it appears that this will exceed 1962 or 1944 along the coast,” Robinson said.